Mac game developer and publisher Pangea Software has posted a boatload of new screenshots of its latest magnum opus, Bugdom 2. The new game is presently in development and is anticipated for release later this year. These images, Pangea said, are representative of the final art you’ll see in the game.
Billed as the sequel to Pangea’s best-selling hit Bugdom, Bugdom 2 features a new hero: Skip the grasshopper. It’s been three years since Rollie McFly defeated King Thorax, but the world of Bugdom has some new threats afoot; threats that Skip will encounter on his way to visit his family.
In Bugdom 2, your job is to help Skip track down the Bully Bee who stole his knapsack and recover it. To do so, you’ll travel across varied terrain in and around the house that Skip was walking near when the Bully Bee attacked. Fortunately, Skip isn’t without defenses, or friends. Skip will be aided by Sam the Snail and Sally the Chipmunk, along with the same Buddy Bugs that helped Rollie McFly in his adventures in the original Bugdom.
Bugdom 2 features more varied play styles than the original Bugdom did. In some sequences Skip must surf down gutter pipes, for example, and in one level Skip will take command of a balsa wood rubber-band powered airplane to bomb anthills as he defends himself from airborne and ground-based attack.
Pangea Software founder Brian Greenstone told MacCentral that Bugdom 2 will be self-published once it’s done. Pangea plans to make the game available for sale both as an online download — for those users with high-speed Internet connections — and on CD-ROM too (the electronic version will be a bit less than the CD version, as well). And as has become tradition with Pangea’s games, many of which have made it on to Apple’s consumer models as bundled software, Pangea plans to make the game available for free to schools, as well.
The game will support both Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X, and will feature support for Truform — technology used by certain ATI Radeon graphics processing units that helps to smooth 3D graphics (Pangea’s last release, Otto Matic, was updated to support Truform). Preliminary system requirements call for a Power Mac G3/266 or 400MHz iMac or faster; 128MB RAM; and ATI RAGE 128 with 8MB of VRAM or more.
For more details and tons more screenshots, visit Pangea’s Web site. The company anticipates taking pre-orders for Bugdom 2 beginning late October.